On the 1st April 2012 I started my attempt to publish a picture taken on every day of the year for the next 12 Months. The day of Fools (1st April) seemed like a good time to start! I succeeded in the challenge (WooHoo!) but thought I would take the next year or so to decide whether to stop or not :) I have now managed four unbroken years; but time will tell how long I can manage not to miss a day without a shutter click ....

Monday, 31 December 2012

As today is the last day of the year, I decided to have an 'end' theme, hence the end of the roll of film.

Good old 120 roll-film is useful as it has a paper backing with all the necessary writing on; 35mm is not quite so useful for the job.

The camera is a 1930's Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515/2; I must put another roll of film in it and use it for future blog posts :) With a 9cm x 6cm negative size, the image resolution possible is a startling 60Mpixel colour image!

Sunday, 30 December 2012

The sun has been out very briefly in between deluges today. I took the opportunity to clean out the chickens and to have a look around the garden while the not-often-seen yellow orb was almost visible in the sky.

I noticed that the Rhubarb has begun to awake from its Autumn slumber and is rapidly putting up some new shoots and leaves.

It looks like an early Spring Rhubarb crumble may be on the cards for supper!

Saturday, 29 December 2012

In tidying up the yellow room, I dug deep enough through the dumped contents of my old office to find my tripod again.

I thought I would try a long exposure to try and capture the motion of the trees at the bottom of the garden. The framing is not ideal, but I thought it was best to keep the power lines in the image as they give a nice fixed 'sharp' part of the image to contrast with the motion.

Friday, 28 December 2012

The number of Starlings has been increasing slowly over the last few weeks. Last year we were lucky in that the vast clouds of birds roosted in the trees around the school field which are a fair distance away.

Unfortunately the birds are roosting in the trees at the back of the house at the moment, making for a very noisy dawn chorus and also starting to pepper the cars with Guano.

Hopefully the deluge of crud will be rewarded in a month or two by great displays of the flocks of birds weaving around in formation.

Fingers crossed they will be a good source of images for future posts :)

I wanted to make sure that I posted the solargraph from December on a day that we actually had some sun and so a line would be present.

Today (17th) was nice and sunny (leaving a trace almost at the very bottom of the set of lines), and the next time was the 21st itself! As I had another picture planned for the 21st, I decided that today would be the day I posted the picture (it was actually extracted from the can on the 21st).

I angled the can a bit more upwards and across when compared to June's solargraph. There are also a few very blank regions of this image as well where October should have been....

We have a real tree again this year and the kids had fun decorating it the other week.

We have kept it watered and so far, the needles seem to be holding well. Hopefully it will last into January before the branches start to bend and dump all the baubles in amongst a heap of pine needles.

There is a lot to be said for fakery, but plastic trees are just not the same somehow.

As the kids are just over halfway through their advent calendars now, Christmas must be getting close.

The advent calendars are good training in self restraint; if the rule was that they could not eat the chocolate until after their breakfast, I am sure one of the kids would have opened all the windows and devoured the lot by now.

Tonight was clear and cold. I remembered to put my tripod outside for a couple of hours to let it shrink, and then had a go with a few star photographs.

The orange street light at the bottom of the garden picked out the few remaining leaves on the apple tree and some chimney smoke in this picture; if you look at it large, there are some of the stars visible too.

I did not do any long timed pictures in the end; it was just too cold!

Friday, 7 December 2012

I had the chance to photograph a stack of broken arrows today. The arrow shafts retreating into the distance is a real lesson in perspective. It is also quite enlightening to see just how inventive folks have been over the years in designing different shapes of metal tips for arrows.

Start by placing the Currants, Slutanas and Raisins in a sieve and washing through with hot water until all the excess sugars are removed and the water runs clear (it can take a little while!)
Core and grate the apples (can leave skin on) using a coarse grater.
Grate the zest off the oranges and lemons using a fine grater and then juice them.
Place all in a big bowl and give it a really good mixing.

Leave the mixture in the bowl covered with a cloth for 12 hours to allow the spices and flavours to mingle; it takes some time for the orange and lemon juice to soak into all the other fruit and if you taste it now, it is quite sharp!

Allow to cool and then make a batch of mince pies from some of the mix, and freeze the rest; as there is very little free sugar in the recipe, the mincemeat will not stay preserved in jars like traditional recipes do.

In theory, the above quantities makes enough mincemeat for a winters worth of pies for us; however some years I have to make a second batch of mincemeat :)

To usher in December, this morning the pond was completely frozen over. It always fascinates me how the patterns form in the ice, and the added chaos of the leaves both frozen under it, and also stuck in the surface where they have fallen in.

I have not seen any birds trying out their skating skills yet, but I am sure it will be fun to watch :)

This morning I managed to catch dawn breaking and just starting to light up the chimneys of the city. The contrast of the orange sunlight to the cold grey stone is fitting for how cold it actually feels this morning!